Road Home program still a dead end for some New Orleans homeowners

John McCucker / The Times-PicayuneChris Meehan amid the remains of his pre-Katrina house in New Orleans' 7th Ward on Dec. 22. Meehan said he encountered every imaginable roadblock in his journey to try and take the road home.

As another post-Katrina year dawns, just shy of 126,000 families have received compensation from the state's signature housing recovery program, the Road Home.

Not all recipients have held up their end of the bargain and rebuilt, but after many early stumbles, the Road Home program can say it has gotten the money out and into nearly every qualified applicant's hands, if belatedly.

But there are still some homeowners who feel left out, whether it's an estimated 3,500 of them working through difficult title and succession issues, or more than 200 who still have open appeals cases, or any of the more than 9,000 with rejected appeals cases who may feel they were turned away unjustly.

For that last group, the end of 2009 brought word that they'll have to accept what the program contractor and the state's internal appeals panel decides, with no access to independent arbiters. On Dec. 7, the Louisiana 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Baton Rouge overturned a trial court judge who had ruled a New Orleans family had the right to take their Road Home complaint to Civil District Court.

Gregory and Valrita Dandridge argued that the Road Home had made a major error by including square footage from detatched garages, against its own rules, thus making them less than 50 percent damaged and decreasing their award by $88,000. But the appeals court ruled 4-1 that they did not have the right to take their case to court after a state agency denied their appeal.

Frank Silvestri, co-founder of the homeowner advocacy group the Citizens Road Home Action Team, or CHAT, served as the Dandridges' lawyer and represents a half-dozen others who are trying to bring their complaints to independent courts.

Silvestri said he is about to file suit on behalf of Chris Meehan, whose 40-month Road Home journey and final rejection this month point to the program's difficulty in clearly applying its one-size-fits-all policies to some of the properties that make New Orleans architecturally unique.

Meehan, a carpenter who restored his own Victorian Creole house in Treme, said he encountered every imaginable roadblock along the Road Home. In the summer of 2006, he applied for a grant to repair the historic two-story house that he had just moved into before Katrina struck.

First, he was told he belonged in the small rental program for landlords because his lot had three addresses. He applied for only one of them, and the other two addresses applied to a traditional New Orleans mother-in-law apartment, a back quarters that happened to have two doors. The separate addresses were an anachronism, he said. It was just 700 square feet with only two rooms and he had never rented it out. That meant he didn't qualify for the landlord program either.

It took a year, but in late 2007, internal Road Home e-mail messages show that program officials agreed Meehan belonged in the homeowner program. And there began another roller-coaster.

Meehan said he was investigated for fraud and accused of not living in hishouse by an inspector from Boston who suggested a white person would not live in a black neighborhood. Meehan later was cleared of fraud.

Documents in his file show Road Home then determined his 2,800-square-foot house was 700 square feet; then the program corrected that to say only 700 square feet were "livable" at the time of Katrina.

The Road Home said he had completed only 25 percent of the home even though he had an insurance settlement that said he had fixed up 75 percent of it. Then documents show he was charged a 30 percent penalty for not having insurance, which was later determined to be a mistake. Finally, he was denied a grant based on the smaller square footage. The state rejected his final appeal a few weeks ago. The reason reverted back to the one Meehan thought was resolved years ago: His property has three addresses.

"I know people have been helped by Road Home, but everyone in this immediate neighborhood still talks about how they got screwed," Meehan said. "When they rejected me, they said, 'You should have known better. You shouldn't have bought the house.' I was shocked. I said, 'Your agency failed in every regard. Your attitude is predatory. It's deny, deny, deny.'"

Meehan said his adviser indicated there are many others dealing with problems caused by multiple addresses. Although applicants' struggles are getting more specialized and no longer suggest major systemic problems, Silvestri says CHAT and other advocates feel a new sense of urgency to bring attention to them: House Speaker Jim Tucker, R-Algiers, recently began a campaign to move unused money from struggling or ending programs into new initiatives, and the fear is money will be taken from Road Home before it's time.

"There's a genuine conflict of interest when the state is deciding on its own errors, especially when the state knows that whatever is left over can be used for other purposes," Silvestri said.

According to a Louisiana Recovery Authority report earlier this month, up to $100 million is set aside for about 3,500 applicants still in the pipeline. That's enough to pay each of them less than half the average grant amount of $64,000.

Meanwhile, $320 million in the remaining Road Home budget is not yet earmarked for any specific purpose, making it a prime target for other uses if the U.S. Congress agrees to let the state move the money out of Road Home.

LRA spokeswoman Christina Stephens said she couldn't comment on specific applicants' cases, but said concerns about money being moved out of Road Home are unfounded. She said Congress will not let the state move the money unless it's clear that all deserving homeowners have been served.

She also said the state could not allow disgruntled homeowners access to independent judicial reviews even if it wanted to.

"If you start getting into outside independent bodies determining grants based on things that aren't within the rules of the program, we can't use (federal) funds to pay those grants," Stephens said. "We'd have to use state general funds to pay those grants, and we all know we don't have the money in the general fund to do that."

David Hammer can be reached at dhammer@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3322.